Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates:
Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.
The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.
Journal Reference:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, Assam El-Osta. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature [open], Genome Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday August 07 2020, @10:06AM
I was going to roll my eyes and mumble about life sciences, but then I remembered an anecdote - a physicist colleague of mine used excel to do the data analysis in his thesis. That would be somewhat tragic, were it not for the fact that he is a C programmer who wrote his own compiler for fun and (successfully) took an undergraduate degree in CompSci because he was bored by high school. I wonder if he had any data points converted to dates in his thesis...